How to: Eat a triceratops

With their big, bitey teeth and teeny, ineffectual arms, it can be difficult to picture how Tyrannosaurus Rex actually managed to eat anything. After all, all of our personal experience with eating involves an awful lot of gripping with the forearms. Some new research, takes a stab at understanding T. Rex table manners. The results are pretty neat — and they highlight the similarities between dinosaurs and birds — but I want to make a bit of a bigger deal out of the methodology.

Several times on this blog, we've talked about the importance of the vast archives of archaeological and paleontological specimens that are sitting around in storage at museums and universities. Some of these things have never even been removed from the matrix of burlap and plaster used to secure them for shipping. Some have sat there for decades, enjoying only a cursory glance from researchers. But when scientists finally start sifting through these unseen specimens, they often find fascinating things.

In this case, scientists turned to the fossil archives to get a broad view of how T. Rexes ate Triceratopses. That involved examining Triceratops skulls from Montana's Hell Creek Formation, looking for characteristic signs of T. Rex teeth marks. Ultimately, they found 18 skulls that were probably once ancient entrées. And these are not the kind of skulls you'd find browsing through a museum. In fact, in many cases, those skulls represented only partial skeletons. So, while, in the past, we've pointed out the need to look more closely at these archives, this is a great example of what you can find when you do. Buried in the back room, there were specimens that have taught us something about how dinosaurs might have lived.

As Fowler and his colleagues examined the various types of bite mark on the skulls, they were intrigued by the extensive puncture and pull marks on the neck frills on some of the specimens. At first, this seemed to make no sense. “The frill would have been mostly bone and keratin,” says Fowler. “Not much to eat there.” The pulling action and the presence of deep parallel grooves led the team to realise that these marks were probably not indicative of actual eating, but repositioning of the prey. The scientists suggest that the frills were in the way of Tyrannosaurus as it was trying to get at the nutrient-rich neck muscles.

“It's gruesome, but the easiest way to do this was to pull the head off,” explains Fowler with a grin. The researchers found further evidence to support this idea when they examined the Triceratops occipital condyles — the ball-socket head–neck joint — and found tooth marks there too. Such marks could only have been made if the animal had been decapitated.

Which is why you never see T. rex on those home makeover shows where they get a budget and an interior designer’s services. Granted, that’s mostly because they blow all the money and eat the designer, but still.

Not sure if alligator or ostrich would be our closest approximation to the taste of dinosaur among extant species that people eat. I’m kind of leaning towards ostrich- though the difference between triceratops and ostrich might be like the difference between beef and venison…

My first response to the whole situation was the same, mostly. I found myself imagining what it would be like to dig into some triceratops and, strangely, some part of me ‘knew’ that it was delightful.

When I read these stories i also think about the movies where one scientist is desperately jealous of another and wonder if these excess fossils that are sitting in storage were collected just to keep anyone else from making a discovery.

Some interesting questions are afaik not answered to date. Like T-Rex hands couldn’t really help with the meal. So when he rips a piece of flesh out of the prey, what then? Head down if he opens his mouth again the piece lodged in his mouth would fall out. So he has to rise his head up to facilitate the chunk going in rather than going out? So I can see a bird doing that, I just have slight difficulty seeing how this works well if you’re big and bulky and heavy. Everything gets slower relatively to body size as you scale it up. So what takes a chicken like 0.1 seconds to pick up a worm, would say take a T-Rex like 20 seconds…